The Beginning

This "project" (quotes because the project part is the process of building it) has been my pride and joy for years. My first PC was not actually built by me, but by my friend's brother who I watched very closely as he did and is what sparked my interest in actually wanting to build one myself. In 2015, my friend's brother offered to build me a PC if I pay for the parts, which I eventually did. I had that rig until about 2018 and that's when I decided I wanted to actually pick out the parts myself and build it from the ground up. After I had my new rig set up, I sold the original one that my friend's brother built to my other friend who wanted a PC for a good price. After I built the one I still have to this day, I swapped out the hard drive so I would have all my data and he would have a fresh Windows installation for his needs. Anyway, I started out by picking out the parts on pcpartpicker.com and had everything shipped to my house at the time.

The Build

The build probably took way longer than it needed to, but that's to be expected as I was completely unassisted and relied on only videos and articles when I ran into an issue. I didn't really have a good spot to build, as I was contained to my room at the time. So, I had to have the case of the new machine propped up on one of the boxes so I could access everything better and not be on the floor (see pic below).   The majority of my build knowledge comes from a tech YouTuber, "Linus Tech Tips" who has numerous "build guides". Over the years, I've watched numerous of his guides and I felt I was confident enough that I could do it by myself. I started out by getting the motherboard out and installing the CPU. I chose the Intel i5 8690k because at the time, it was a good mid-line between cost and performance, with the ability to overclock due to it being "unlocked". For memory, I chose a 2x8gb kit of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 to have a decent amount of memory. I would eventually upgrade this kit to a 2x16gb kit in 2022 due to memory constraints with the video editing performance of my rig. I chose an AIO liquid cooler because of my processor being unlocked, and knew that it would have better performance over an air cooler when I would eventually overclock my CPU to 4.5 GHz. The installation for all of these parts so far was pretty straightforward and with little hiccups (yet). As a gamer and a video editor, a GPU is a very important component to handle all of the graphics processing, so I went with EVGA's Nvidia GTX 1070. It wasn't top of the line at the time, but just one step below the 1080, which I believe the 1070 performs well for my specific use cases and budget at the time. Needless to say, I haven't upgraded the GPU or CPU as of 2024 and I built this rig back in 2018. For storage, I used the drive I already had from my other PC I was selling to my friend, and over time, I would add more drives as my need for disk space expands. By this point, I had the majority of the rig built and just needed to plug in the cables where they needed to go and do some cable management. Which I will say, the case I chose does not have a lot of room for cable management in the back, as I had some trouble getting the back side panel on, and is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to open the back side panel unless its absolutely necessary.  

Troubleshooting

Which then leads me into the major problem I ran into when I tried booting it for the first time. I thought I had everything plugged in where they needed to go, but when I pressed the power button, the status lights on my motherboard were turning red like it had an error. After some quick research and a consult of my friend, I discovered that the power cable to the CPU was not plugged in at all. After some trial and error, I figured out where the CPU power header was on the motherboard and discovered that it was a very tight fit due to the radiator of my AIO cooler being located on the top of the case, where the cable needed to go. I eventually poked the cable through a very small opening towards the top of the case and had to unmount the radiator to get it to fit after I realized the cable wasn't plugged in. By this point, I had everything where it needed to be and it was finally time to power it on for the first time (2nd time's the charm, right?). So, I pressed the power button and low and:  

What a great feeling this was. Watching my machine boot up, the fans spin, everything working beautifully. The overwhelming sense of accomplishment at this point was so rewarding to me. I had built myself my own pc with little help and problem solved my way to where it could eventually POST. This build experience has taught me so much and I'm still learning everything I can. As I stated before, my needs changed over the years and I eventually swapped out the memory kit I had originally installed for double the capacity, but with RGB because why not? I did run into a problem when installing the new kit, as the top-mounted radiator caused some clearance issues with the new memory kit. So, I had to re-mount the radiator to the front of the case, and that's where it sits in my case today.  

Current State

I currently have two HDD's (4TB and 2TB), a 250GB SSD and my most recent drive addition, a 2TB M.2 NVME drive which is currently my boot drive. The whole process of cloning my original boot drive to the M.2 drive was a process in of itself, but with the help of some software, I was able to clone the original boot drive to the new drive and have the new one host my OS, which granted me even faster bootup times. At this point, I don't really have any experience with RAID technologies, but I'm aware of the benefits of having drives in a RAID array, which I'm saving to configure on a rack mounted server I'm planning on eventually getting and setting up for my homelab setup. I do have other plans for upgrades for this machine in the future, but for the time being they're just plans and until I can put them into action, they will stay as just plans. Overall, this machine has been my "workhorse" and serves as my main machine for my setup currently. This machine has served my needs very well from the time of building until now and will for years to come.